Chuj (Mayan) Narratives
Folklore, History, and Ethnography from Northwestern Guatemala
•
Nicholas A. Hopkins
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Chapter 1. Chuj Country 3 A Note on Language Relations and Prehistory;
Field Work in the Chuj Region Chapter 2. Narratives in Chuj 22
Introduction to the Texts; Discourse Structures of the Narratives Chapter 3. Coyote and Rabbit 31
Commentary; Lexical Issues; Overview;
Grammatical Notes; Coupleting Marks the Peak Event; Text Chapter 4. An Old Man Whose Son Killed Him 41
Commentary; Text
Chapter 5. Friend of the Animals 52 Commentary; Text
Chapter 6. The Sorcerer 64 Commentary; Text
Chapter 7. The Communists 96 Commentary; Text
Chapter 8. Taking Out the Salt 110 Commentary; Text
Appendix I
A Short Sketch of Chuj Phonology, Grammar, and Syntax 126 Appendix II
Text Analysis: Coyote and Rabbit 144 References 163
International Map Productions, Vancouver, BC, Canada. ISBN 0-921463-64-2.
3
Chuj Country
C
huj is a Mayan language spoken in the northwest corner of the Department of Huehuetenango, Guatemala, and in adjacent areas across the international border in Mexico. There are two principal vari- eties of the language associated with the towns and municipios of San Mateo Ixtatán and San Sebastián Coatán. At the time represented by these stories, Chuj of both varieties extended into the neighboring municipio of Nentón, to the west. These narratives are all from the San Mateo variety of Chuj.The areas occupied by the Chuj are dramatic. The town of San Mateo Ixtatán sits at an elevation of just under 8,400 feet above sea level (Dirección General de Cartografía 1962[2]:199). Surrounding peaks rise to 11,500 feet. Higher ground across the river valley from the town was covered by cloud forest until recent years. Down the river, called Titz’am in San Mateo (“mouth of the salt,” salt mine) and Cambalam downstream to the east, the altitude falls sharply. At Bar- rillas, the next town, the altitude has dropped to about 4,600 feet above sea level (Dirección General de Cartografía 1962 [1]:37), a drop of some 3,800 feet.
The moist gulf air that is pushed up the river valley shrouds San Mateo in a wet afternoon mist that drives people off the streets and into houses to sit next to the hearth.
Given the climate, it is no surprise that the name of the language derives from a prominent feature of households, the sweatbath. “Chuj” is a word that is ultimately of Mamean origin, but is used in local Spanish for the low structures that sit at the sides of houses, used for ordinary bathing as well as curing cere- monies. I once asked a man why they didn’t bathe in the rivers, and he looked at me astonished and said, “Good Lord! Do you know how cold that water is?”
It is likewise no surprise that the women’s huipil (Chuj nip) is typically made of a double layer of heavy cotton cloth, with designs in thick embroidery cov- ering the back and chest, and the traditional men’s jacket, the capixay, is heavy wool. The latter is made by the men, who spin and weave the wool and put the garment together, adding a stitched design resembling a pectoral cross around
the neck. This element of clothing (Chuj lopil) must have been introduced by priests from northwest Spain, because the Spanish word capixay comes from the Basque capo sayo, vulture cape. These wool tunics are prominent in trade. Their makers carry them across the Mexican border to Comitán, Chiapas, for sale;
throughout highland Chiapas they are known as koton chuj or just chuj, and they are the typical men’s jacket in Amatenango, between Comitán and San Cristóbal de Las Casas.
A few miles west of San Mateo, the Ixtenam River (Chuj yich tenam, “at the foot of the rock outcrop”), rises and flows west to meet the Grijalva River in Chiapas, falling to about 2,000 feet above sea level near the Mexican border in the municipio of Nentón (Dirección General de Cartografía 1962[1]:481).
Chuj country is thus typically high altitude valleys surrounded by higher peaks, drained by swift-flowing streams. Access to water becomes a problem toward the end of the dry season (December to May), when people may be forced to walk miles to the nearest productive spring or waterhole. The desiccated vege- tation in this period gives rise to brush fires that march unimpeded across the landscape. Vegetation varies widely from low oak forests to high rain forests, with cloud forests at higher elevations (see Breedlove and Hopkins 1970–71 for details).
Figure 1.2. A typical sweatbath (Chuj ikaj). The Mam term for sweatbath, chuj, provides the name of the language of their
northern neighbors. Patalcal, May 1965. Photo by author.
Figure 1.3. The older design of the San Mateo Ixtatán huipil, lak’an nip. Photo by Elizabeth Purdum.
Figure 1.4. The newer design of the San Mateo Ixtatán huipil, kolob’ nip. Photo by Elizabeth Purdum.
Figure 1.5. The San Mateo Ixtatán men’s jacket, lopil (Spanish capixay). Photo by Elizabeth Purdum.
Figure 1.6. Vegetation along the trail from San Mateo Ixtatán to Bulej, May 1965. Photo by author.
In the 1960s, when these stories were collected, the official estimate of the number of Chuj speakers at the last census (and it was only a rough estimate) was 10,771 (Dirección General de Estadística 1950, Cuadro 29). The total population of the three municipios (San Mateo Ixtatán, San Sebastián Coatán, and Nentón) was 17,496. By 1964, a later census reported that total population figures had jumped to 28,214, an increase of more than 61 percent. The number of indig- enous language speakers must have increased accordingly. If so, the number of Chuj speakers may have been around 17,000 in 1964.
At the time I did my field work there were virtually no published reports on the language. The missionary David Ekstrom (1961) had produced a partial San Mateo Chuj translation of the New Testament. Similar translations into San Se- bastián Chuj had been made by Kenneth Williams (1963a, b, c), as well as a short grammatical sketch (Williams and Williams 1966). A few brief vocabulary lists had appeared in a variety of sources (Recinos 1954, Swadesh 1961, Mayers 1966), and Andrade (1946) had supplied some textual data. But there was no adequate description of the language to be consulted. As a result, I was assigned the task of producing the basic descriptive package of structural linguistics: a phonology, a grammar, and a set of texts.
My mentor and major professor, Norman A. McQuown, who had done his dissertation on Totonac under Edward Sapir, had inherited Manuel J. Andrade’s Mayan materials when he came to teach at the University of Chicago, and he decided to direct research into the relatively undocumented family of Mayan lan- guages. He set about assigning graduate students to one language after another, choosing the tasks according to the place of the language in the family, field condi- tions, and the abilities and weaknesses of the student. A major effort went into the Chiapas Study Projects, starting in the late 1950s and coordinated with Stanford and Harvard Universities, focused on the Chiapas Highlands. Harvard continued its concentrated research in Zinacantán (Vogt 1994); Stanford and Chicago took on the rest of the Tzotzil and Tzeltal communities (McQuown and Pitt-Rivers 1970). My first field experience, 1960–62, was with this project. Married couples with children were given assignments that kept them in more civilized condi- tions. As an expendable bachelor, I was assigned to the north Tzotzil area and specifically to San Pablo Chalchihuitán, where the Cuban anthropologist Calixta Guiteras Holmes had done basic ethnographic work (Guiteras Holmes 1951).
San Pablo Chalchihuitán was a small community with a ceremonial center located on a ledge beneath a mountain massif that had kept its population—lo- cated on the other side of the ridge—free of contact with the outside world since the Conquest. There was only one non-Indian (Ladino) resident in the village,
doubling as the schoolteacher and secretario municipal. No electricity, no plumb- ing, no stores, and no road connecting it to the outside. It was good preparation for San Mateo Ixtatán. In 1964, when I told John Avant, a friend who had done ethnographic survey work in Guatemala, that for my dissertation work I had been assigned to San Mateo Chuj, he just laughed and said, “If you liked Chal- chihuitán, you’ll love San Mateo!” The first passable road connecting San Mateo to the departmental capital at Huehuetenango had been blazed just a year or so before by the army, under the threat to local Indian authorities of cutting out their tongues if they objected, and the road still had sections of “corduroy,” logs laid across the road for traction on muddy slopes.
Fortunately, among the many things McQuown taught his students was that you didn’t have to suffer more than necessary. Getting the work done was the main thing. While ethnographers and social anthropologists have to be present in their field areas as “participant observers,” taking part in community affairs and constantly observing the goings-on, linguists have the luxury of being able to remove themselves to a more comfortable setting, away from the complica- tions and constant interruptions of village life. What we need to know resides largely in the mind of any one speaker of the language, so acquire a good speaker to help you and go somewhere you can concentrate on the research without hav- ing to maintain community relations (and where you have electricity, hot show- ers, and cold beer).
Figure 1.7. Capitanes perform at the crosses in front of the church in the center of downtown San Pablo Chalchihuitán, Chiapas, 1961. Photo by the author.
My first excursion to San Mateo was with the goal of finding a good lan- guage consultant. The Catholic priest, Father Arthur Nichols, recommended a man who had served him as simultaneous translator, Francisco Santizo Andrés. We talked and he agreed to come to Huehuetenango for a trial two weeks, after which we would decide if we wanted to work together. We both enjoyed the experience so much that we continued to work together for a lit- tle more than a year. During that time I accumulated some four hours of recorded tape (160 pages of transcription) from Francisco, and on excursions into the field another six hours (525 pages) from other speakers, as well as two dozen dialect survey questionnaires that covered the area of San Mateo Chuj speech. We also collected and identified hundreds of plants (Breedlove and Hopkins 1970–71) and recorded ethnographic information about topics like kinship, salt production, the Mayan calendar, geographical place names, and, of course, a corpus of folktales and narratives. Some of this material has been published, some awaits discussion. All the recorded material has been archived at AILLA (www.ailla.utexas.org, the Archive of the Indigenous Lan- guages of Latin America), including the recorded performances of the narra- tives presented here.
The situation of Chuj and the speakers of Chuj has changed drastically since my field work was carried out. The devastation of the Guatemalan civil
Figure 1.8. San Mateo Ixtatán (ko chonhab’, “our town”), seen across the valley from the road to Barillas. August 1964. Photo by author. The road from
Huehuetenango is visible above the town. Below it, the church, and to the left the school and the precolumbian ruins of Guaxaclajún (Wajxaklajunh,
“eighteen”).The salt mines lie below the town, above the (unseen) river.
war (“ la violencia”) hit the Chuj area hard. Dozens of villages were destroyed or abandoned. Population fled to Mexico and on to the United States, where there are Chuj colonies in California, Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida (at least). New populations flowed in to fill the empty spaces, so the current demography is nothing like it was when my study was done. The Summer Insti- tute of Linguistics (Ethnologue.com) estimates there are 41,600 Chuj speakers in Guatemala, and another 1,770 elsewhere (but this refers only to Tziscao, Chiapas, and other populations in Mexico, and not the populations in the United States).
The status of linguistic studies has also changed drastically. The Proyecto Lingúístico Francisco Marroquín (PLFM), initiated by Maryknoll priests but picked up by North American linguists when the former were expelled from the country, has trained several generations of native Mayan language speakers, including Chuj, and turned the direction of the Proyecto over to its graduates.
That organization has in turn spawned the Academia de las Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala (ALMG) and other activist groups, and these have negotiated edu- cational and cultural reforms with the Guatemalan government, including a set of official orthographies that have replaced the ad hoc creations of missionaries and dilettantes (Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala 1988). A very active publication program operates under the rubrics of PLFM and Cholsamaj, among others.
This movement has produced two Chuj-Spanish dictionaries (Felipe Diego and Gaspar Juan 1998, Academia de Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala 2003), with other material available on the internet. An American linguist working with PLFM, Judith Maxwell, now at Tulane University, was a consultant on the dictionary project, and has produced a dissertation on Chuj (Maxwell 1978b) as well as a number of scholarly articles (Maxwell 1976–2001). My own dictionary of Chuj is an on-line publication (Hopkins 2012a). A Mexican linguist, Cristina Buenros- tro, at the Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, has worked with the Mexican Chuj colony at Tziscao and produced a series of works (Buenrostro 2002–13). A recent addition to the repertory are the works of Jessica Coon at McGill University (Coon 2016, Coon and Carolan 2017).
The academic reader will note that there is no attention given here to linguis- tic theory nor is there reference to literary analysis, beyond noting some aspects of the discourse strategies of the narrators. This is deliberate. My purpose is de- scriptive and empirical, to present to those who would wish to see such analyses the material they would need to do the job, and to introduce the language and its oral literature to students and others.
A Note on Language Relations and Prehistory
The Mayan language most closely related to Chuj is Tojolabal (sssat.missouri.
edu), whose speakers reside to the west in adjacent parts of the eastern extremes of the state of Chiapas, Mexico, between the border and the town of Comi- tán. The subgroup of Mayan composed of Chuj and Tojolabal is called Chujean (chart 1). Mexican Tojolabals make an annual pilgrimage to San Mateo to carry out rituals and take home salt, and it is reasonable to postulate that the an- cestors of the Tojolabal came from the Cuchumatanes area and expanded into lowland Chiapas. According to the approximate dating of glottochronology, the native and migrant populations would have achieved effective separation by about 1,600 years ago, or somewhere around 400 AD (in terms of Mayan archaeology, in the Early Classic; language classifications and all glottochro- nological figures are from Kaufman 1978:959; for a detailed discussion of the family, see Campbell 2017).
CHART 1. The Mayan Languages Huastecan
Huastec (Wastek, Teenek), Chicomuseltec (Chikomuseltek, Kabil) Yucatecan
Yucatec Maya (Maya, Yucatec), Lacandón (Lakantun); Itzaj (Itzá), Mopan (Mopán) Western Mayan
Cholan: Ch’ol (Chol), Chontal (Yokot’an); Ch’orti’ (Chortí) and extinct Ch’olti’ (Choltí)
Tzeltalan: Tseltal (Tzeltal), Tsotsil (Tzotzil)
Kanjobalan: Q’anjob’al (Kanjobal), Akatek (Acatec), Popti’ (Jacaltec); Mocho’
(Mochó, Tuzantek, Motozintlec) Chujean: Chuj, Tojol-abal (Tojolabal) Eastern Mayan
Quichean: Q’eqchi’ (Kekchí), Uspantek (Uspantec); Poqom (Poqomam, Poqomchi’);
K’iche’ (Quiché), Kaqchikel (Cakchiquel), Tz’utujil, Sakapultek (Sacapultec), Sipakapense (Sipacapeño)
Mamean: Mam, Tektitek (Teco), Awakatek (Aguacatec), Ixil (Ixhil)
Language names not in parentheses are the preferred current usage (Aissen et al. 2017:8–9), names in parentheses are traditional and alternative names. Many more variants exist, and preferences are in constant flux. Family subdivision names are those established in modern literature; all but Huastecan constitute Southern Mayan. Western and Eastern Mayan together constitute Central Mayan (Kaufman 2017:66–67).
Surrounding Chuj on the south and east are varieties of the Kanjobalan (Q’anjob’alan) languages: from west to east Jacaltec, Acatec, and Kanjobal proper (Popti’, Akateko, and Q’anjob’al). This subgroup is the closest relative of Chujean, sharing a common ancestor that existed around 100 BC (in the very Late Preclassic). Chujean and Kanjobalan constitute “Greater Kanjobalan,”
The situation of these languages within the Western branch of Mayan suggests that their ancestors in turn became distinct from their nearest relatives after migrating into the Cuchumatanes from the riverine areas to the east, the lower Ixcán and Chixoy Rivers, by about 1,000 BC (in the Middle Preclassic). Shortly thereafter a similar movement into the Chiapas Highlands resulted in the di- versification of the remaining riverine group, “Greater Cholan,” evolving into Tzotzilan (Tzeltal and Tzotzil) in the Chiapas highlands and leaving Cholan (which later became Chontal [Yokot’an], Chol [Ch’ol], and Chortí [Ch’orti’]) in the riverine lowlands.
The two large subgroups of languages Greater Kanjobalan and Greater Cholan constitute the branch of the Mayan family known as Western Mayan, in contrast to Eastern Mayan, the languages of the Guatemalan highlands. The Mayan family consists of these languages (which form Central Mayan) plus Yucatecan (to form Southern Mayan) and Huastecan (Kaufman 2017). The di- versification of the family was effective by about 2,100 BC (that is, by the Early Preclassic), and probably involved dispersion from a common homeland into the Yucatán Peninsula and the upper Gulf Coast (Yucatecan and Huastecan, respec- tively), into the lowland riverine and piedmont areas of Guatemala (Western Mayan), and into the Guatemalan Highlands (Eastern Mayan).
Differences within the Cuchumatán languages (Greater Kanjobalan) came about at least in part by differential influences from their neighbors to the north and south. A chart of shared innovations (Josserand 1975:503, fig. A) shows that Tojolabal and Chuj (as well as Tzotzilan) share several phonological inno- vations with Cholan and Yucatecan Mayan to the north, the languages most involved in Classic Mayan culture. Kanjobalan languages share one of these innovations, but also share innovations with Eastern Mayan languages to the south. The Cuchumatanes is thus a “shatter zone,” an area of closely related languages that is splintered by differential external influences. In fact, the most notable difference between the two varieties of Chuj, the loss of vowels and the reduction of resultant consonant clusters in San Sebastián Coatán Chuj, resembles features of the development of the Mamean languages that extend northward into the Cuchumatanes. In grammar and lexicon, the creation of the noun classifiers that characterize Chujean and Kanjobalan languages (and
some varieties of Mam) has been attributed to the influence of Chiapanec, a dominant Otomanguean neighbor to the west, in late pre-Columbian times (Hopkins 2012b).
Early and insightful ethnographic work was done in the Cuchumatanes by Maud Oakes on Mam-speaking Todos Santos Cuchumatán (1951), by Oliver LaFarge on a Kanjobal community, Santa Eulalia (1947), and by LaFarge and Douglas Byers on Jacaltenango (1931). Frans Blom and LaFarge made archaeo- logical, ethnographic, and linguistic notes as they traveled through the area in 1926–27. The status of ethnographic knowledge at mid-twentieth century was briefly summarized by Charles Wagley (1969). A similar report on mid-century linguistic work was compiled by William Bright (1967), and McQuown (1967) sketched earlier work on Mesoamerican languages sources, beginning with Eu- ropean contact. Hopkins and Josserand (1994) have outlined trends in Mayan linguistics from the Colonial period to the present.
Field Work in the Chuj Region
The narratives presented here were gathered during my dissertation field work in 1964–65. My first exposure to the Chuj language was in 1962, when I went to the Department of Huehuetenango, Guatemala, with Norman A. McQuown and Brent Berlin to gather data on the languages of the Cuchumatanes (Berlin et al. 1969). At the time I was a graduate student in the Linguistics Program at the University of Texas at Austin. Like Berlin, I was temporarily employed as a research assistant on the University of Chicago’s Chiapas Study Projects, directed by McQuown (McQuown and Pitt-Rivers 1970; Hopkins 1964b, 1967a,b, 1969, 1970a, 1974). Working through the Maryknoll priests who were then the Catholic clergy in the indigenous areas of Huehuetenango and else- where in Guatemala, we recorded material, usually in the form of 100-word Swadesh lists (for glottochronology), from several languages. The sample in- cluded two speakers of San Mateo Ixtatán Chuj, including the man who was later to become my tutor.
In the spring of 1962, as field work for the Chiapas project wound down, I returned to Austin to finish drafting my master’s thesis (Hopkins 1964a), and then went on to Chicago to begin graduate studies in anthropology at the Uni- versity of Chicago, with McQuown as my major professor. I continued to work on Chiapas project materials in McQuown’s archives, and in 1963 he assigned me the Chuj language as the topic of my upcoming doctoral dissertation (Hop- kins 1967a). Over the next academic year I transcribed and analyzed the Chuj
materials we had collected and prepared preliminary analyses of the phonology and morphology of the language. During this period I also worked as a labo- ratory assistant in the Language Lab at the University of Chicago, and I am indebted to its technical director, Don Ledine, for teaching me the proper pro- tocols for recording, handling, and preserving magnetic tape recordings.
At the end of the summer of 1964, with support from a National Defense Education Act Foreign Language Fellowship, I went to Huehuetenango to begin field work on Chuj. By the end of August I had contracted a native speaker of Chuj, Francisco Santizo Andrés, and rented a house in the city of Huehuet- enango, where we began work in earnest. From then until September of 1965 we worked an eight-hour day, six days a week, with occasional breaks when Fran- cisco would go home and I would go to San Cristóbal de Las Casas, where Berlin and other anthropologists and linguists were working on their own projects.
We began by reviewing my preliminary analyses and correcting my errors of transcription, as well as my phonemic analysis. Francisco had worked as a simul- taneous translator for the San Mateo Maryknoll priest, Father Arthur Nichols, and he had a keen sense of language. He quickly pointed out errors in my anal- ysis, including the missed contrast between the consonants written here as /j/
Figure 1.9. Huehuetenango. The yellow house on the corner (with a door and two windows) was my home and project headquarters, shared with Francisco Santizo
Andrés. In the background, the Cuchumatán Mountains. Photo by the author.
and /h/, velar and laryngeal fricatives. Chuj is one of the few Mayan languages to preserve this contrast from Proto-Mayan (see Kaufman 2003). I learned later that Kenneth Williams, the Protestant missionary working on San Sebastián Coatán Chuj, had caught the contrast, but his Summer Institute of Linguistics colleagues refused to accept his analysis, to his great frustration. Based on the revised analysis of the phonology, Francisco and I agreed on a technical orthog- raphy for Chuj, using the cent sign for /tz/ ([ts]), the letters <c> and <s> with hachek for /ch/ and /x/ ([t∫] and [∫]), the letter <x> for /j/, and so forth. This was reasonable at the time, since we were decades away from the era of practical orthographies.
Francisco mastered the new way of writing without delay, and we began to record short narratives dictated by him: an encounter in the market with a friend from home, a short biographical sketch, accounts of agriculture and salt production; see the archives at AILLA (the Archive of the Indigenous Lan- guages of Latin America, www.ailla.utexas.org) for these recordings. Francisco would dictate a text to the tape recorder, operated by me, and then transcribe the tape, preparing a Spanish glossing if necessary (see Hopkins 1980b, a text on salt production). I would go over the transcriptions and ask questions about the grammar and lexicon. All the lexical material gathered by these techniques was put on three-by-five-inch slips and filed in the lexical file that is the basis for my dictionary of Chuj (Hopkins 2012a). I also used a technique devised by Terry Kaufman for Mayan languages, the Monosyllable Dictionary, to elicit vo- cabulary. This technique involves constructing all the possible CVC sequences (Consonant-Vowel-Consonant, the most common root shape in Mayan) and trying to find lexical items based on each. Surprising things emerge that neither speaker nor linguist would expect.
After a field trip to the San Mateo area in February 1965, to collect plants with Dennis Breedlove (Breedlove and Hopkins 1970–71), in May of 1965 Francisco and I carried out a two-week dialect survey of the area in which San Mateo Ixtatán Chuj was spoken, in the municipios of San Mateo Ixtatán and Nentón, collecting material from seventeen aldeas and the town center, a total of twen- ty-seven questionnaires. (No regional patterns of distinction were noted.) Sev- eral texts were recorded during this field season and as usual the transcribed material was incorporated into my lexical files. Back in Huehuetenango, Fran- cisco spent his time transcribing the material we had collected and consulting with me as questions arose. When a topic came up, we would extend the lexical data by eliciting more items in the same domain, that is, animal names (Hop- kins 1980a), place names (Hopkins 1972), and other lexical and ethnographic
material. Since that was the era of ethnoscience, some research was done into the semantic structures of these domains (Hopkins 2006). When the transcription of a narrative was finished, I would prepare an English translation on the basis of the Chuj original with support from Francisco’s rough Spanish glossing. We also worked on numeral classifiers, and I was engaged with Brent Berlin and Chris Day in a comparative study of this domain in Chuj, Tzeltal, and Jacaltec Maya (Hopkins 1970b).
I returned to Chicago in September 1965, to finish my graduate work and my doctoral dissertation. I then took a job teaching anthropology at the University of Texas in Austin, and continued to process my Chuj materials. I married Kath- ryn Josserand in 1970 and spent a year in Milwaukee, where she had been teach- ing, and then returned to Texas. In 1973 we left Texas for Mexico City at the invitation of Angel Palerm to establish the Programa de Lingüística at the new Centro de Investigaciones Superiores del INAH that he directed (CISINAH, now CIESAS, the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antro- pología Social). Work on Chuj was abandoned in favor of field training and research on languages closer to Mexico City, especially Otomanguean languages (Hopkins and Josserand 1979). A few years later, because we had begun to follow the developments in Maya epigraphy, we began to work on Mayan languages Figure 1.10. Cloud forest vegetation featuring tree ferns. The first time my botanist
colleague Dennis Breedlove saw these, he thought they were palm trees—until he saw the spore spots on the undersides of the fronds! Photo by the author.
again, but field work was on Chol, not Chuj (Hopkins and Josserand 2016). We returned to the United States in 1982 and spent some ten years hustling a living with grant support, workshops on Maya hieroglyphic writing, and leading tours to the Maya areas we knew from field work. In 1991 Kathryn took an academic
Figure 1.11. The San Mateo aldea Patalcal (pat alkal, “house of the mayor”), May 1965. The entire countryside was shrouded with
smoke from an uncontrolled brush fire. Photo by the author.
Figure 1.12. A typical house in Patalcal: walls of adobe, roof of wood shingles. The porch and patio in front of the house are the principal work areas. Photo by the author.
job at Florida State University and I began to work there as an adjunct profes- sor. We concentrated our field work on Chol and our academic work on Maya hieroglyphics.
I did not return to work on Chuj until 2005–6, when I received a National En- dowment for the Humanities Documenting Endangered Languages Fellowship.
Figure 1.13. During our dialect survey, tin roofing arrives for the new Catholic church in the aldea of Xubojasun (xub’oj asun, “breath of the
clouds”), municipio of Nentón. May 1965. Photo by the author.
Figure 1.14. Cross shrine on a rock outcrop on the outskirts of the aldea of Canquintic (k’ankintik, meaning unknown), municipio of Nentón. May
1965. A woman in a red huipil kneels to the left of the cross. Entering the village with a loaded mule, I was hailed by a woman who ran from her house
to ask “Tas ha chonho’?,” What are you selling? Photo by the author.
Figure 1.15. On the trail in the Yolcultac (yol k’ultak,
“center of the brushland”) forest, municipio of Nentón.
May 1965, at the end of the dry season. Photo by the author.
This fellowship allowed me to prepare my Chuj materials for digitization and ar- chiving at AILLA. All my recorded materials on Chuj are archived there, along with my transcribed Field Notes and Field Photos, and a revised version of my dissertation (in a modern orthography). The collection includes some forty sam- ples of Chuj speech from eight Chuj settlements, some of which no longer exist.
More than twenty of the settlements reported in my inventory of place names were abandoned or destroyed in the genocide of the so-called civil war (Manz 1988:83–89).
In the summer of 2011, I dug out of a closet a wooden chest that contained four drawers of lexical slip files, untouched since about 1970. Over the next few months I transcribed the lexical entries into an electronic text file, using the practical orthography that I had designed for Chuj; the now-official orthog- raphies did not exist at the time (Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala 1988). These transcriptions included all the data on plant and animal names, place names, numeral classifiers, and so forth, that I had previously published. The resulting dictionary (Hopkins 2012a), which includes a grammar sketch, is housed on the website of the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc.
(www.famsi.org/mayawriting/dictionary/Hopkins/dictionaryChuj.html), now administered by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. I continue to un- earth and revise Chuj materials (Hopkins 2012b), and after publishing on Chol folktales (Hopkins and Josserand 2016) I turned back to the Chuj texts I had collected some fifty years earlier. A sample of those texts constitutes the present collection.
A Note on Orthography
In my field work with Francisco Santizo Andrés, we used a technical linguistic orthography that used the cent sign <¢> and a letter <c> with hachek (as in Czech orthography) for the affricates, an <x> for the velar fricative, and other conventions of contemporary linguistic usage. When I prepared my material for archiving at AILLA, I transcribed my Chuj material into a practical orthogra- phy of my own design. Now, a set of new orthographies for Mayan languages has been negotiated between Maya activists from the Academia de las Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala, the Proyecto Lingüístico Francisco Marroquín and other native-speaker organizations. The Chuj narratives that follow have been retran- scribed to follow the norms of Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala (1988). Note that despite efforts to standardize, there is still considerable variation in the orthog- raphies used by Mayanist scholars (Aissen et al. 2017:9–11).
Elsewhere my Chuj materials have been presented in my earlier orthography.
For those who wish to consult that material, the changes from the official or- thography are the following: I write glottal stop as <7>, following Kaufman (2003), and I write it thus in all positions. The official orthography does not write word-initial glottal stops, which are implied by a word-initial vowel, and writes them elsewhere as <‘>, the same as the glottalization on consonants. The alveolar affricates are written <tz, tz’> instead of <ts, ts’>. The glottalized bilabial stop is written <p’> instead of <b’>. I do write the velar nasal <nh>, as it is written here (in my dissertation it was written <N>, and <ng> would be a reasonable option).
All these choices have linguistic motivations, but orthographies are not strictly linguistic devices, and I support Maya activists in their preferences.
22
Narratives in Chuj
T
his collection of six narratives told in Chuj demonstrates the broad variety of stories people tell one another and the variety of sources of those stories: personal narratives, legendary events, mythological tales, and stories borrowed from other cultures. All were recorded by me during field work on Chuj from 1964 to 1965. (See the Archive of the Indigenous Lan- guages of Latin America, www.ailla.utexas.org, for these and other samples of Chuj speech recorded during field work; AILLA reference codes for each text are given below and at the head of each transcription.)Introduction to the Texts
Two of the stories are ultimately of foreign origin, but their origins are not the same. In one case, the story known to the narrator as An Old Man Whose Son Killed Him [CAC 002 R022], the story clearly comes from the European tra- dition, and must have been introduced to the Chuj by schoolteachers. It is the classic Greek tale of a couple whose child is destined to kill his father and how that came about, including the solution to a famous riddle: What animal walks on four legs at dawn, on two legs at noon, and on three legs in the evening?
The other tale, Coyote and Rabbit [CAC 002 R027], is probably ultimately of African origin, although some of its episodes are traditional in the American South and may have been introduced secondhand to the Chuj. This is the series of incidents that make up the Br’er Rabbit stories, stories that reflected earlier African tales involving Hyena instead of Fox (Diarassouba 2007). Here the story features Coyote instead of either Fox or Hyena. Coyote stories and stories of Rabbit Trickster abound in the native New World, and some of the episodes may be of American origin, adapted to the framework of the African stories. Some ep- isodes have a local flavor (such as misty mountains) and are likely of local origin.
A third story, Friend of the Animals [CAC 002 R020], expresses such a universal theme that it could possibly be of foreign origin as well, but it has
elements that suggest it is native. First, the moral of the story, that good acts are reciprocated, is basic to Maya belief (but not, of course, unique to that culture).
Second, some of the incidents are similar to events related in the Popol Vuh, a sixteenth-century collection of Highland Guatemalan mythology, legend, and history (Christenson 2007). Finally, the relationship between the two protago- nists, a good younger brother and an evil elder brother, is also present in known Mayan tales (see Hopkins and Josserand 2016:41–58), but of course it is likewise not unique to the Maya. Arguing for a native origin is the fact that the story contains no foreign elements. Critical events in An Old Man Whose Son Killed Him feature a card game and a pistol, and then there is that riddle. Coyote and Rabbit is filled with foreign elements: a tar baby and a cheese, for instance. But Friend of the Animals has no such non-Maya features.
The fourth story, The Sorcerer [CAC 002 R012], is clearly of native origin, because it relates events said to have occurred in the Chuj communities within living memory. It is local history even though it treats supernatural phenomena that an outsider might consider inventions of a creative mind. But these are the parameters of local understanding of events. Not all that happens is easily ex- plained in terms of Western empirical science; other forces may well be behind the events, and in fact are assumed to be present in local worldview. That people have companion animals, and powerful people have correspondingly powerful animals, is taken for granted, and it explains a lot of things that have hidden causes. (For other manifestations of this belief system, see Guiteras Holmes 1961 for Tzotzil and Pitarch 1996 for Tzeltal.)
The story about The Communists [CAC 002 R036] is again local history.
The evil elements present are not supernatural nor are they easily controlled.
This story anticipates the terrible events that were to ravage the Chuj area some decades later and result in the diaspora of the Chuj people. It concerns the early stages of what is called la violencia, the government’s war on its most vulnerable populations, a civil war whose consequences are still felt.
The final narration, Taking Out the Salt [CAC 002 R008], is an extended monologue that outlines the production of San Mateo’s famous black salt. To an extraordinary degree the salt trade pervades San Mateo society—economics, poli- tics, and religion are all involved and both genders and all social levels participate.
The presentation of these narratives is in matched columns of Chuj and En- glish, and these stories appear here for the first time in English translation. In- sofar as possible, the translation matches the Chuj line for line, but of course this is not always possible. However, the sense of the Chuj is preserved to the extent that a translation to a foreign language can do so. The Chuj text was
transcribed directly from the tape recordings made in the field, and the tran- scriptions were done by a speaker of the same variety of the language. They were checked by me against the tapes, and I translated the tales directly to English.
For those who wish to delve deeper into the original language of the narrations, I have appended a grammar sketch, summarized my thesis [CAC 002 R065], and employed the official Chuj orthography. An independently derived gram- mar of Chuj by the Mexican linguist Cristina Buenrostro is also posted in the AILLA archive [CAC 004 R001]. See also my Chuj-English dictionary [CAC 002 R066].
I have tried to avoid excessive editing. Mistakes and hesitations have been left in the text, although some of them are marked by parentheses or brackets.
Preliminary conversations and closing statements are intact, and the transcrip- tions generally represent everything that is on the tape. That is, I want these stories to be presented as they were told; I do not want to try to outguess the speakers and change the language they employed, even if it might in some way
“improve” the text.
In my opinion, the presentation of native oral literature is all too often edited to “improve” it. The worst-case scenario is when the texts are not presented in the original language at all, but are retold in a different language and in a style more familiar to the Western reader. The rough content of the story is preserved, but not the style of its telling. This is a common tendency in collections that are destined to be used in schools; out of a mistaken conception of respect for the native tradition, the translators want the stories to fit into a familiar—and more prestigious—canon. My favorite commentary on this sort of presentation is that of the Australian aborigine scholar, T. G. H. Strehlow (1947), in his introduction to the complex and beautiful tales of the Aranda. In order to illustrate how ab- original oral literature was normally presented (in pidgin English translation), Strehlow gives parallel treatment to the Shakespearian play Macbeth, a jewel of English literature. The result (reproduced in Hymes 1964:80) is both hilarious and sobering: [ole lady Muckbet:] “Me properly sorry longa that ole man, me bin finishem; him bin havem too much blood, poor beggar. . . .”).
Even when the text is presented in the native language, “needless” repetitions may be eliminated, when repetition is one of the most characteristic devices in Maya literature, without which the tale can hardly be called Maya. And as we discovered working with Chol storytellers (Hopkins and Josserand 2016), the introductory remarks that are often edited out as “not part of the story” (“This is a story I learned when . . .”) are in fact an expected element in storytelling. You might as well delete from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address the opening sentence
(“Four score and seven years ago . . .”), since it is just background information,
“not part of the story” (which might be said to begin with “Now we are engaged in a great civil war . . .”). Since before learning better I was guilty of the same, I am particularly sensitive about this.
I do regret not recording more stories. At the time there were two reasons for this. Since my primary goal was to write a sketch of the phonology and mor- phology of the language, I really only collected texts in order to have extended samples of language that I could scan for instances of grammar and lexicon (the former destined for Hopkins 1967a, the latter compiled as Hopkins 2012a). The expected “package” for a linguistics dissertation in those days was the phonol- ogy, the morphology, and sample texts; syntax was not yet the principal (even the sole) focus of a thesis as it is today. The second reason I didn’t record more texts in the field was that the recording device was a battery-powered Uher tape recorder, and recording ate up batteries at a frightful rate. Since there was no electrical power and no source for batteries anywhere outside major towns, all the batteries for a two-week field trip had to be carried in. I didn’t even record most of my field interviews for this reason; while my Chuj was not fluent, I could at least do running transcriptions of wordlists during the interviews.
I believe that none of us anticipated the rate at which things could change among the indigenous populations we work with. There was a tendency to think of these societies as unchanging over time, although nothing could be further from the truth. I once believed that the women’s huipils and men’s clothing that I saw in highland Chiapas were so traditional that they must have been the same for decades if not centuries. Then I became aware of old photographs of people from the region, and it was obvious that features that I took to be fixed diagnos- tics for certain villages were in fact changing all the time. When I was working in San Mateo Ixtatán, the woolen tunic capixays worn by the men had vestigial sleeves, about elbow length but too narrow to accommodate the arm; they stuck out over the upper arms. I was told that a couple of generations earlier the sleeves had been wrist length, and men actually put their limbs into them. Then before I left the field, I saw a man wearing the next generation of sleeves: a triangular flap that covered the upper arm, not a sleeve at all. Chip Morris (2010) has docu- mented such changes in highland Chiapas, where the rhythm of innovation has accelerated from a new design of outfit every year for the fiesta to a new design at least twice a year with ever more drastic changes.
The same processes affect oral literature. Once upon a time people learned the stories and how to tell them in informal contexts, boys with men together in the fields, girls with women at the hearth or collecting firewood, and both in
long candle-lit evenings with the family. Good storytellers were a primary source of entertainment. I remember occasions on which I would ride in the back of a truck with the other passengers on the three-hour trip to and from Chenalhó and San Cristóbal de Las Casas. If we were lucky the Chenalhó butcher would be on the truck, and he could spin story after story to form a narrative that lasted all the way to our destination.
Now a lot of the contexts in which stories were told no longer exist. Chil- dren go to school to learn a different genre of stories, and home entertainment may involve books or a radio or television rather than an elder. One effect of the loss of context is the decline of indigenous botanical knowledge; children learn rudimentary Western botany in schools but not the plants in their en- vironment. The effect of this cultural and social change can also be seen in government-sponsored collections of stories in indigenous languages. Tales told by younger speakers often seem to take comic books as their literary models, not traditional narratives. (For a sample of published texts in one Mayan language, see the inventory of Chol narratives in Josserand et al. 2003 and Hopkins and Josserand 2016.)
Countering this acculturative tendency is another factor. In the latter half of the twentieth century, a number of programs were founded with the goal of training speakers of indigenous languages to carry out research on their own lan- guages. In Guatemala, for instance, the Programa Lingúístico Francisco Marro- quín in Antigua; in Mexico the Programa de Etnolingüística in Pátzcuaro (and later elsewhere). These and similar programs have produced a cadre of native lin- guists who are closer to their traditions than any outsider could be, and to a cer- tain extent they have contributed to the preservation of native lore (see Vásquez 2001). However, time is limited, and what is not collected while more traditional storytellers are still alive is lost. It would truly be a shame if feeble efforts like the present work were the only remains of an impressive tradition of narrative art.
Discourse Structures of the Narratives
The more traditional of these narratives display a structure familiar to me from Chol folktales (Hopkins and Josserand 2016), but with notable differences. Nar- rators tend to open their talk with what has been called an evidentiality state- ment, brief remarks about where the story comes from—on what evidence does the storyteller relate the events? More traditional folktales may be attributed to the ancestors: Ay wal jun yik’ti’ ko mam kicham chi’ ay kanih, There is a story of our ancestors that remains (Coyote and Rabbit). The narrator may cite a more
recent source: Ay jun toto wab’nak, There is one I just heard (Friend of the Ani- mals). The story may simply be relegated to the distant past: Ha’ t’ay pekatax ay jun winh icham chi’, A long time ago there was an old man (An Old Man Whose Son Killed Him). In any case, we are told that this is not something the narrator him or herself witnessed but part of the oral literature. In contrast, a personal narrative or a general discussion of things present begins quite differently: T’a jun k’uh tik, ol wala’ chajtil skutej sk’eta ats’am ats’am, Today, I’ll talk about how we bring up the salt (Taking Out the Salt). The historical account of The Sorcerer begins: Antonse swik’ti’ej winh anima chi’, porke tob’ te aj b’al winh, So, people talk about a man, because he was a great sorcerer. These attributions to one’s own knowledge or community lore are the equivalent of the evidentiality statement.
After the opening evidentiality statement, necessary background information is supplied to set the scene for what follows. This may be brief: ay jun tsanh yun- inal winh, tsijtum yuninal winh chi’, He had some sons, he had many sons (An Old Man Whose Son Killed Him). It may be longer (Friend of the Animals):
Yuj chi’, So,
aj k’ol jun winh t’a junxo winh . . . one man was the enemy of another . . .
Haxo winh chi’ te ijan’och winh t’a winh. He was always demanding things.
Ah, taktob’ te muy wena jente
jun winh chi’ They say he was a very good man.
Haxob’ syalan winh jun to . . . So they said about one man . . . ah, te wenaj te wen omre winh chi’. such a good man that man was.
Haxob’ jun winh chi’ chuk sk’ol winh. The other man had an evil heart.
In the long historical narrative The Sorcerer, the background segment runs to nearly twenty percent of the text before the use of the completive aspect marker ix signals the first event on the event line: Entonse, hanheja’ chi’, ix yab’an heb’
winh, jantak heb’winh chuk chi jun, So, just like that, they heard, many of those powerful men.
The background having been set, narration of a traditional tale proceeds to the event line, the framework around which the story unfolds. In the discourse style of the Chol, events on the event line are related in the completive aspect, like the example just cited in the Chuj story of The Sorcerer. But such is not the case in many of the present tales. Some contain not a single instance of the com- pletive aspect. They are related in a timeless past, but there are other elements that place the events of the narrative in nonpresent times. One such marker
is the reportative, appearing in various forms: hab’,-ab’, or simply-b’, which I have usually glossed “they say.” Identifying the events of the story as traditional knowledge places them in the past without the need for further marking. The avoidance of the completive aspect also makes the point that the events are not something that we can say actually took place at some specified time (unless they did). In the present set of texts, events as such tend to be heavily weighted with quoted dialogue. If the narrator is able to quote dialogue, the implication is that the events really did take place. Furthermore, the use of dialogue makes the actors real in a way that descriptive prose would not.
A series of related events, usually taking place in the same setting and with the same protagonists, makes up an episode. Each single event may be introduced by its own particular background segment that changes the scene or the actors in some way. A new event may be introduced by one of the standard introductory words (yuj chi’, entonse, yos, weno, and so forth [for that reason, then, yes, okay]).
The last event of an episode may be closed out in a couplet (reminiscent of the scene-closing couplets in Shakespeare’s plays). In Friend of the Animals, for in- stance, the events end with sentences coupleted either by the main narrator or by him and the secondary narrator. This back-channeling is typical of tales told in a natural setting, where there are narrators and listeners all participating in the discourse. The full set of event closings in Friend of the Animals is the following (DGA and PSP are the two storytellers):
DGA: B’at heb’ winh, b’i’an. They went, then.
PSP: B’at heb’ winh. They went.
PSP: Yak’anxi alkansar spat nok’. He was able to get home again.
K’och chi nok’ t’a spat chi jun. The dog went back to his home.
PSP: Tsab’ yik’anb’at ixim nok’
chay chi’. Those fish carried the maize away.
DGA: Nok’ chay chi’. Those fish.
PSP: “K’inalokam yoch wejel t’a ko k’ol
tik,” xab’ih. “Every day they get hungry like we
do,” they say he said.
DGA: Hi’. Yes.
DGA: T’a winh yuk’tak chi’. Against his brother.
PSP: Hi’, t’a winh uk’tak chi’. Yes, against the brother.
PSP: Yak’an hab’ b’at jun yol sat winh. They say he gave him one of his eyes.
Yo, masanto yak’b’at jun yol sat winh. Yes, he even gave him one of his eyes.
PSP: Kan winh. The man stayed behind.
DGA: B’at winh chi’ b’i’an. That (other) man left, then.
PSP: Sb’oxi winh, b’i’an. The man was well again, then.
DGA: B’oxi winh, b’i’an. The man was well again, then.
At the very end of a narration, there is usually a closing phrase that tells the listeners that the story has ended. There is no more to come. This may be as sim- ple as Ix lajwih, It ended (An Old Man Whose Son Killed Him, The Sorcerer).
Friend of the Animals was a tale told by two narrators that began with one saying he had just heard a story and that the other man knew it. It ends with a jubilant cry: Weno, na’an ku’uj! Okay, we remembered it!
In the narratives that are not traditional folktales, there is less formal structur- ing. They do tend to begin with an opening, something like an evidentiality state- ment if just an announcement of what is to come: Swik’ti’ej winh anima chi’, I’ll tell about a man . . . (The Sorcerer); Walb’at ha tik ne’ik, ol walb’atih, walelta chajtil ix k’ulej . . ., I will speak now, I will speak out, about how we did (The Communists);
T’a jun k’uh tik, ol wala’. . . . Today, I will talk about . . . (Taking Out the Salt).
Following the opening, there may not be a clear set of events organized into episodes, and background information may be mixed in with what amounts to the event line. However, the narration will be segmented into paragraph-like sections by introductory words like yuj chi’, entonse and yos. In the transcription of these nontraditional narrations, I have added marginal notes that mark major changes in topic; in an oral presentation, pauses and alterations of vocal quality are used for the same purpose.
At the end of the narration, the narrator may recap the events or comment on them in some way (parallel to what we have called the denouement in Chol folktales): Yuj chi’, icha chi’, chamnak winh anima chi’ . . ., So, in that way, the man died (The Sorcerer); Icha chi’ ix ko k’ulej t’a jun tiempo chi’, Thus we did in that time there (The Communists); Yuj chi’, icha chi’ yet’nak yik ats’am ats’am chi’, So, that’s the way it is with the salt (Taking Out the Salt). Texts normally then close with some device that tells the listener(s) that the performance is over:
Weno, ix lajwih, Okay, it’s over. Turn off the recorder.
The observation that traditional folktales are narrated in a more structured way than personal or procedural narratives emphasizes the point that there is a
narrative tradition that has norms, an oral literary canon. This tradition goes back a long way. Based on our understanding of current narrative practices, we have been able to identify their antecedents in Classic period hieroglyphic texts.
While the substance of the discourse markers may have changed, the structures they participate in are more resilient. The overall structures of formal texts are similar, as are the rhetorical devices employed. A comparison of two essays by the late Kathryn Josserand is instructive. In one (Josserand 1991), she described the literary patterns of Classic hieroglyphic texts at Palenque. In another (Josserand 2016), she provided a parallel discussion of the patterns of modern Chol story- tellers. Others have made similar observations about the continuity of literary aspects of Mayan culture (see Hull and Carrasco 2012 for an excellent sample drawn from Classic, Colonial, and modern material). Not only do the modern Maya have a rich oral tradition; their remote Classic ancestors had standards of literature that deserve to be recognized along with their achievements in art, architecture, astronomy, and calendrics.
31
Coyote and Rabbit
T
his text has several interesting aspects. In the opening eviden- tiality statement the story is attributed to the ancestors, although it can clearly be argued that it is imported, parallel to the African story cycle known to Americans as the tales of Br’er Fox and Br’er Rabbit (see Diarassouba 2007 for an Ivory Coast version, featuring Hyena and Rabbit). On the one hand, tales of Rabbit Trickster are common in the Americas. On the other hand, the introduction (in episodes not reported here but included in the oral text posted on AILLA) of foreign artifacts like cheese and the tar baby mark this story as not entirely native in its origins. The use of Spanish loanwords for the names Rabbit and Coyote also suggests a non-native origin.This story was recorded in San Mateo Ixtatán in May 1965. Francisco Santizo Andrés and I were there to begin a dialect survey of Chuj-speaking communi- ties, taking advantage of the weather. It was the end of the dry season, and on the climb out of town when we started our two-week trek we encountered one of the daykeepers assuring a man coming down to the market that the rains were sure to come in the next few days. In fact they came as we were returning to San Mateo a fortnight later. We had arrived in San Mateo in the morning of May 1, and Francisco was spending some well-deserved time with his family. I was housed in the municipal offices in the small plaza facing the church. Francisco came and went as he tried to contract beasts of burden for our trip, with little success. Friends dropped by to see him, and we elicited a set of questionnaires and a matching census during the morning. In the evening we were again visited by a number of Francisco’s friends and acquaintances, and one of them, Baltazar Tomás, from the aldea Patalcal, dictated this story.
A text that I recorded the next day, from a near-monolingual Chuj speaker, was Oedipus Rex (here called An Old Man Whose Son Killed Him). The tale was complete to the riddle about what animal walks first on four legs, then two legs, and finally three legs (Man). These stories from the international repertory must have been taught at some time in the local schools. Good stories do get
around. A Jacaltec version of this Coyote-Rabbit tale was published by Grine- vald (Craig 1978).
Lexical Issues
The term for “ancestors,” ko-mam k-icham, is in itself interesting; it is a com- pound noun formed by the juxtaposition of two possessed kin terms, mam “fa- ther,” and icham “uncle/nephew” (father’s brother, mother’s brother, and recip- rocal, sibling’s son; Hopkins 2012a). This metonymic union of two opposing categories implies the immediately inclusive superior category, in this case, “male ancestors,” including both direct and collateral relatives. Note that the corre- sponding term for ancestors in Ch’ol is lak tyatyña’älob, “our father-mothers”
based on tyaty-ña’ “father-mother.”
It is notable that the Rabbit is treated distinctly from the other animals men- tioned. Chuj has a set of “noun classifiers” that function both as determinatives and as pronouns (Hopkins 1967a, 2012b; see the appendix). Here, Rabbit is honored with the marker for “male (human),” winh, while the other protago- nists are demoted to nok’, “animal”: winh konejo, nok’ koyote, although the nar- rator occasionally mixes the noun classifiers up and says nok’ konejo or winh koyote. The early protagonist Ram carries the special animal-class designation for horn-bearing mammals, ch’ak: ch’ak kalnel. Curiously—or perhaps another indication of the foreign origin of the story—the protagonists take Spanish loan- word names konejo, koyote, and kalnel (from conejo, coyote, and carnero). Rabbit is never called by his native name, chich. Coyote appears first as native okes, but the narrator later switches to introduced koyote. There is no native equivalent for the name of the introduced mammal kalnel.
Overview
The episodes of the narration consist of a descriptive passage and a dialogue, terminating in a closing event. This pattern repeats three times before transiting to the following episode (not reported here). The text opens with an evidentiality statement.
Opening: There is a story.
Evidentiality: Our ancestors told it.
First Event
Background: The Ram is introduced, then the Coyote.
Dialogue: Coyote asks if Ram has seen his friend Rabbit. Ram re- sponds that he is over by that boulder. Coyote says he’ll go there.
Closing: Coyote leaves.
Second Event
Background: Coyote finds Rabbit pushing on a boulder shrouded by swirling clouds.
Dialogue: Coyote hails Rabbit. Rabbit tells him his story. Coyote re- sponds he will help.
Closing: Rabbit leaves, and Coyote stays, thinking he is holding up the rock.
Third (Peak) Event
Background: Coyote lets go of the rock, which doesn’t fall. He has been tricked.
Dialogue: Coyote swears vengeance on Rabbit (in coupleted lines).
Closing: Coyote leaves.
The peak event of this episode is marked as such by the structure of the dialogue (or monologue). Coyote speaks in parallel statements, a couplet followed by a triplet. (Note that the verb Coyote uses to voice his suspicions is the Spanish loanword joder.)
The story continues through a number of such episodes, all with similar struc- tures: Coyote comes up on Rabbit in a situation that is described, they engage in conversation, and Rabbit tricks Coyote and escapes; Coyote follows swearing vengeance. After the rock outcrop incident, Coyote comes upon Rabbit seated on a stump in a clearing, eating a potato, which he shares with Coyote. Coyote asks where he got it, and Rabbit informs him that we all have them, hanging between our legs. Coyote sees that that is the case, and asks how he can get them out of their container. The way to get them is to sit down on the stump and smash them with a rock, says Rabbit, and he departs while Coyote is raising a large rock to smash his testicles. Coyote comes upon Rabbit staring at the reflection of the moon in a stream, Rabbit tells him it is a cheese that can be had only if Coyote drinks the water it lies beneath; while Rabbit escapes, Coyote drinks so much water he swells up and bursts. Coyote comes upon Rabbit in a garden where the farmer has set out a tar baby to catch marauders, Rabbit tricks Coyote into attack- ing the tar baby, and escapes while Coyote is stuck to the tar. In the final episode in this telling, Rabbit tricks Coyote into falling into a farmer’s trap and departs.
A somewhat different version of the Coyote and Rabbit story has found its way to the neighboring Kanjobalan language Jacaltec (Grinevald 1978). A priest
annoyed that Rabbit has taken a bite out of his watermelon sets a “tar baby”
trap—a wax cross—and snares the villain. Before he can return with a hot wire to run up Rabbit’s anus, Coyote appears and is tricked into getting stuck. Rab- bit escapes and Coyote pays the penalty. Rabbit then tricks Coyote with the
“falling” rock, followed by the cheese in the water and finally the fruit-between- the-legs, in this case, the seeds of the coyol tree. Unlike the Chuj story, Coyote’s attempt to extract the seeds proves fatal.
It is notable that these episodes have the classic structure of the “short con,” as described by David Maurer (1940) in The Big Con. In the short con, the swindler takes the victim for an immediate reward, whatever he has with him; in the “big con,” the victim is sent off to bring back even more goodies. In both, the con man sets up a situation that attracts the attention of the potential victim. He then
“tells him the tale” (in this case that the boulder is about to fall and kill them).
The victim falls for it, and the con man “takes the touch,” receives his reward (here, escape). The con man must somehow “cool out” the victim and escape (in this case convincing the coyote to stay holding up the boulder). The con man moves on to another victim. In this extended tale, Rabbit fools the same victim, Coyote, over and over again.
Grammatical Notes
Unlike many other Mayan tales, this narration does not make use of the contrast between incompletive (ongoing) and completive (finished) aspects of the verb.
Chol, for instance, uses the former for background information and the latter for the event line (Josserand 2016). Here, the event line is related in noncom- pletive forms. Quoted dialogue uses all aspects, but the encapsulating text does not. However, the events are shown to have happened in the past by the use of the reportative particle hab’, glossed here “they say” (and reduced to -ab’ or even -b’ in verbal constructions). This particle is used to mark statements that are traditional knowledge, not current events or hearsay but things that happened long ago and are known only from the oral tradition. At the end of the opening evidentiality statement, the past status of the actions to be related is indicated by the adverb peka’, “long ago”:
Ay wal jun yik’ti’ komam kicham chi’ aykanih.
There is a story from our ancestors which remains.
Hab’ yak’ jun tsanh komam kicham chi’ peka’.
They say some of our ancestors gave it [to us] long ago.
The sentences that enclose the reported dialogue are marked with the reportative hab’, -ab’, or -b’). For instance, in the first, long passage, the reportative appears only in the initial sentence (ayab’):
Ayab’ nok’ ch’ak kalnel. They say there was a ram.
Following the quoted speech by the coyote and introducing the speech of the ram, the reportative appears once again, and again in the closing of the quote (Haxob’ . . . xchab’):
Haxob’ yalan nok’ ch’ak kalnel chi’ t’a nok’ okes chi’, t’a nok’ koyote chi’ . . . They say that ram spoke to that coyote, to that Coyote . . .
. . . xchab’ nok’ kalnel chi’, t’a nok’ koyote chi’.
. . . said, they say, that Ram to that Coyote.
Coyote responds and leaves, ending the first event. Coyote goes off to find Rab- bit, and his greeting is again marked with the reportative particle (yawajab’):
Antonse sk’anb’an, yawajab’ b’at, haxo winh konejo chi’ jun.
Then he asked, he cried out, they say, to that Rabbit, then.
Rabbit is leaning against a rock concealed by swirling clouds, pushing against it with his hands, reportedly (hab’):
La’an chab’il hab’ sk’ab’ jun konejo chi’, la’an yamjinak jun k’e’en chi’.
Propped by two, they say, hands of Rabbit, propped was held that rock.
Coyote’s greeting is again marked by the reportative (xchab’):
“Tas tsa k’ulej chi’, konejo,” xchab’ nok’ koyote chi’.
“What are you doing there, Rabbit?” they say said that Coyote.
And when Rabbit has finished his explanation, the reportative appears again (xchab’):
“Sta wyen,” xchab’ nok’ koyote chi’.
“Okay,” they say that Coyote said.
When the coyote discovers he has been tricked, his final speech is again marked as reported (xchab’):
. . . xchab’ winh koyote chi’.
. . . they say Coyote said.
The reportative particle appears throughout the episode to place the events in the distant past, known only from the oral tradition. Thus without employing the completive aspect (something that definitely happened and is finished) the story is marked as an ancient affair.
The use of the reportative instead of the completive aspect may also suggest that these events are not concrete events that took place at specific times (the completive aspect) and not on-going actions in recent or current time (the in- completive aspect), but are timeless mythological events.
Coupleting Marks the Peak Event
The coyote’s monologue that ends the final episode consists of a couplet and a triplet, the “zone of turbulence surrounding the peak” (Longacre 1985):
“Tob’an tonhej tsin yak’ joder winh,
tob’an tonhej tsin yak’ joder winh konejo tik.”
Maybe he’s just screwing me,
maybe this Rabbit is just screwing me.”
Tak olin lajelih.
Tak tekan to, olin mila’.
To olin say hin k’olok.
Perhaps I will finish him.
Perhaps still I will kill him.
Still I will look for my enemy.
Exit Coyote. Curtain down. End of the first act.
